by Tom Perrotta
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile.
“It'll be much easier to do your papers,” my mother said hopefully.
My father slapped the seat. “She's a beauty. Why don't you take her for a spin.”
“It's getting dark,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
A wounded look flashed across my mother's face. My father gave me the raspberry.
“Hey,” he said, “if you won't, I will.”
My mother held open the front door as he lugged the bike outside. I got out of the recliner and followed them down the front steps to the edge of the driveway. My father straddled the crossbar.
“Here goes nothing,” he said.
“Be careful,” my mother called out.
He got off to a shaky start. The handlebars swiveled from side to side, and the bike followed an invisible slalom course down the sidewalk.
“He fell in love with that bike the moment he saw it,” my mother said. “I hope you like it.”
“I do,” I said. “It's really nice.”
My father turned around at the corner and headed back in the street, looking much steadier on his return. He was grinning and breathing hard when he dismounted.
“Give ‘er a whirl,” he told me. “She's got some pep.”
As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. The fat tires hummed, and the bike, heavy as it was, floated luxuriously on the blacktop. I could go as fast as I wanted.
The sky darkened as I pedaled past houses, stores, and factories, shifting through my three new gears. If Kevin had been home, I would've gone straight to his house to show him my birthday present. He would've laughed and taken it for a test ride. Instead he was sitting on a log in the woods, listening to the spooky night.
Somehow I ended up in front of his house anyway. It was as if the bike had taken me there of its own accord. My legs felt hollow as I climbed the front steps. The doorbell button was glowing orange, like a lit cigarette.
* * *
I had been gone for a long time, but my father was still waiting for me on the front stoop when I got back.
“How'd you like it?” he asked.
“It's great. I didn't want to get off”
“Man,” he said, “what I wouldn't have given for a bike like that when I was your age.”
We each took a handlebar and wheeled my new bike up the driveway. My father had cleared a place for it inside the toolshed.
“I looked at the ten-speeds,” he told me, “but they cost an arm and a leg. Besides, what do you need ten speeds for?”
“I don't know,” I said.
Before we went inside, we stood for a few minutes in the backyard, gazing up at the stars. It was a clear, moonless night. The Big Dipper, one of the few constellations I knew, was blazing in the sky like an upside-down question mark.
I had just ratted on my best friend. At that very moment, Kevin was probably walking out of the woods between his mother and Paul, and I didn't know if he was going to hate me or thank me. My father put his hand on my shoulder.
“Thirteen,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Race Riot
The way I heard it, these two black guys crashed the teen dance in the Little League parking lot. One of them had a funny hat, a red sailor's cap pulled down over his eyes. The other was tall and skinny. At first they just hung out near the band, jiving and nodding their heads to the music.
In 1975 Darwin was still an all-white town, a place where blacks were not welcome after dark. It must have taken a certain amount of courage for the two guys just to thread their way through the crowd, knowing they were being watched and whispered about, maybe even pointed at. The focus of the dance shifted with their arrival, until the whole event came to revolve around the mystery of their presence. Did they like the music? Were they looking for trouble?
Nobody really minded until they started bugging Margie and Lorraine. Later Margie said it was no big deal, they just wanted to dance. But she was wearing these incredible cutoffs, and Sammy Rizzo and some of the other football players didn't like the way the black guys were staring at her ass. There would have been trouble right then, but a cop stepped in when it was still a shouting match and sent the brothers home.
I'd left the dance early with Tina, so I didn't see any of this happen. I didn't even hear about it until Tuesday afternoon, when Sammy Rizzo slapped me on the back and asked if I was ready to rumble.
“Rumble?” I said. The word sounded old-fashioned and vaguely goofy to me, like “jitterbug” or “Daddy-o,” something the Fonz might say on Happy Days.
“Yeah,” he said. “Tonight at eight. Better bring a weapon.”
I didn't own any weapons except for a Swiss army knife that seemed completely unsuitable for a rumble, so I had to improvise from a selection of garden tools hanging in my parents’ toolshed. My choice—a short, three-pronged fork used for weeding—was a big hit at the Little League.
“Jesus Christ,” said Sammy. “That looks like something outta James Bond.”
“Yeah,” Mike Caravello observed. “You could probably rip someone's balls off with that.”
We were sitting on picnic tables inside the pavilion, waiting for the baseball game to end. Caravello sat next to me, twisting his class ring around and around his finger. He made a fist and the ring's red jewel jutted up from his hand, a freak knuckle.
“Some nigger's gonna get Class of ‘74 tattooed on his face,” he said, flashing a nasty silver grin. He was way too old to be wearing braces.
A jacked-up Impala squealed into the parking lot behind the first-base bleachers. Caravello pounded the tabletop.
“Fuckin’ excellent! It's the twins!”
The twins got out of the car and looked around, using their hands for visors. They were both wearing overalls with no shirts underneath, and their muscles were all pumped up from lifting.
“Which one's Danny?” I asked.
“The one with the tire iron,” Caravello said.
My chest tightened up. Until that moment, the fight had seemed like a game to me, a new way to kill a night. But the twins were serious brawlers. They hurt people for fun. Caravello called them over so he could introduce me.
“This is Joey T.'s cousin, Buddy,” he said. “He's gonna be frosh QB next year.”
The twins nodded. They had shoulder-length hair and identical blank faces, like a genetic tag team. I couldn't imagine playing football with people their size.
Danny scratched his head with the tip of the tire iron.
“Joey comin' tonight?”
“He can't,” I explained. “He's eighteen now.
If he gets busted, they won't let him be a cop.”
Danny's brother, Paul, asked to see my weeding implement. Its three prongs were bent and sharpened, forming a sort of metal claw.
“Wow,” he said. “You could tear somebody's eyes out with this.”
The twins made fourteen of us. Our ranks, I noticed, were pretty much split: half normal guys, half psychos. The normal guys—I considered myself one—were just trying to defend our hangout. The psychos were looking for a good time.
The Rat Man, Sean Fallon, was busy picking his teeth with the rusty tip of his switchblade. I couldn't even look at him without getting the creeps. He got his nickname from his habit of biting people in fights. A few months before, for no good reason, he had bitten off Ray Malone's nipple in the middle of what was supposed to be a friendly wrestling match. A cop had to drive the nipple to the hospital so the doctors could surgically reattach it to Ray's chest. I heard that he carried it into the emergency room in a small white envelope. Norman LaVerne sat next to the Rat Man, frowning and shaking his head. Years ago, when he'd lived in another town, people said that Norman had buried a cat from the neck down and run over its head with a lawn mower. Normally I crossed the street when I saw him coming. But tonight we were on the same side.
“TWO, FOUR, SIX, EIGHT, WHO DO WE APPRECIATE?”
Baseball hats, purple and red, f
lew into the sky and fluttered down. The players and spectators slowly drifted out of the park. I could feel the tension gather. We stopped talking and fixed our eyes on the paths that led through the woods to the Washington Avenue section of Cranwood, where the blacks lived.
At five to eight, two cop cars drove into the park from separate entrances and converged on the pavilion. Jim Bruno got out of the lead car. He was the greatest running back our town had ever produced; people still called him the Bulldozer. I remembered going to games with my father and watching him plow through the defense, play after play, dragging tacklers for yards before going down. He had a mustache now, and the beginnings of a donut gut.
“Fight won't happen,” he announced.
Nobody moved.
“You want me to put it in sign language?”
He looked at the ground and spat neatly between his polished shoes.
The Camaro was brand-new, gleaming white, with a plush red interior and a wicked eight-track system. Caravello's parents had given it to him as a graduation present even though he hadn't graduated. In September he would begin his fifth year of high school. Technically, he was still a sophomore.
We cruised down North Avenue, Deep Purple blasting from our open windows. I liked Caravello when he let me ride in his car. The rest of the time I had my doubts about him. He didn't have any friends his own age, and I resented his success with the girls who hung out with us at the park. I especially hated the way he turned on you when a girl showed up. He had this trick of turning his class ring so the jewel faced out from his palm, and then clapping you on the head with it.
Caravello turned down the music as we passed the lumber yard.
“Fuckin’ quarterback,” he said. “Every cheerleader in the world will want to suck your cock.”
“Not quite,” I said.
He waved me off. “You don't know shit. Those football parties are wild.”
I thought about the stories I'd heard.
“Is it true about Margie Waldman?”
Caravello grinned. I could see the rubber bands inside his mouth, white with spittle. “What'd you hear about Margie Waldman?”
“You know. That she did it with the whole starting team after the Thanksgiving game.”
“Not the whole team,” he said. “Just the defense.”
We stopped at a red light in front of the perforating company. Two huge fans blew factory exhaust straight into the car. Outside, swing shifters in rumpled green clothes sat against the red brick building and ate their lunches. They chewed slowly and gazed at us without interest.
“Stupid assholes,” Caravello said. When the light turned green, he laid a patch.
Just before we reached downtown Elizabeth, Caravello pulled a U-turn and headed home. Beyond the smokestacks and water towers, the last streaks of color were dissolving in the sky. Instead of continuing straight into town, we turned left at Jim's Tavern and made the quick right onto Washington Avenue.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“If the niggers won't come to us, we'll have to go to them.”
We drove slowly down the street. The houses we passed were no different from those on my own block, but the idea of black people living in them made them seem unfamiliar. Five minutes from home, and I felt like I'd crossed the border into another country. Caravello cut the headlights and pulled over behind the Cherry Street school. He left the engine running.
“There they are,” he said.
A bunch of black guys—you could tell from the speed and grace of their game that they were in high school—were running full court on the lot behind the school. It was a weird spectacle at that time of night. Only the two baskets were lit up, one by a spotlight attached to the school, the other, more dimly, by a nearby streetlight. Center court was a patch of darkness.
It was a game of fast breaks. The players would be visible for an instant around one basket, and then they'd scatter abruptly into the shadows, only to emerge seconds later at the other end of the court, already off the ground, arms stretching for a ball we couldn't see.
I was so caught up in the main game that I didn't notice the kid at first. He was about my own age, and he was playing a game of his own. When the real game exploded into light at one end of the court, he'd suddenly appear at the other, driving to the hoop past imaginary opponents, pulling down his own rebounds, always vanishing just before the stampede caught him from behind.
Caravello pummeled the steering wheel and started pressing on the horn, shouting curses into the night. For a second, I thought the car itself was screaming.
“Fuckin’ assholes! Chickenshit niggers! Bun-cha pussies!”
The game stopped. The players near the school and the kid at the far basket turned in our direction. A couple of the bigger guys started toward us, but their movements were confused, hesitant. I yanked Caravello's hand off the steering wheel. The silence came as a jolt.
“Come on,” I said. “Let's get outta here.”
* * *
The car climbed into the rich hills of West Plains, past stone mansions and big white houses with four or five cars in the double driveways. The air smelled sweet and green.
“Let's get some pussy,” Caravello said.
“I have to be home by nine-thirty.”
He frowned. “Can't get pussy until ten or so.”
“I know. I can't believe my parents still pull this curfew shit on me.”
“You think that's bad? My sister's sixteen and my old man still won't let her out of the house on weekends. She just locks herself in her room and cries all the time.”
“Jeez.”
Caravello took his hand off the wheel and delivered a sharp backhand to my chest. “Ever get any?”
“Any what?”
“Pussy, asshole.” He mimicked me. “Duh, any what?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“You went with Tina the other night, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you telling me you didn't get in her pants?”
“Nope.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“She wouldn't let me.”
Caravello pushed me hard into the passenger door.
“Don't be stupid, Buddy. They all say no, but they don't mean it. It's just something they have to say, so you don't think they're sluts.”
“They must mean it sometimes,” I said.
Caravello shook his head.
“You better grow up,” he told me.
I stared out the window for a while. We drove past Echo Lake. Even at night, you could see that the water was brown and shiny.
McDonald's was on Grand Avenue across from the paper mill. It felt good pulling into the parking lot in the Camaro. Usually I just sat inside the restaurant with friends, sharing fries and writing my name in salt on the tabletop, dreaming of the day when I would have a car.
“Wait for me,” I told Caravello. “I gotta take a whizz.”
Although the parking lot was packed with cars and kids, the restaurant was nearly empty. My Uncle Ralph was the only customer inside. He sat with his back to me at a table near the window The dwarf we called Kareem was mopping the floor around my uncle's feet.
The restroom was disgusting. It smelled like somebody had just puked in there. I held my breath and pissed as fast as I could. I flushed the urinal as a favor to Kareem, then went to say hi to my uncle. When I came up behind him he was grinding a cigarette into the overflowing ashtray as though he held a grudge against it. I touched his shoulder.
“Uncle Ralph.”
“Buddy, how's it going?” The National Enquirer was spread out in front of him like a tablecloth.
“Fine,” I said. “What's in the news?”
“Look at this.” He pointed with his yellowed fingertip to a headline that read, “Biggest Public Toilet in the Universe!”
“It says here that the Russian astronauts are dumping their excrement directly into outer space. Can you believe it? All these turds just floati
ng around up there?”
“Don't our guys do it too?” I asked.
“No sir. We cart ours home.”
“It's really cold up there,” I pointed out. “It probably just freezes right up.”
“That's not the point,” he said.
Kareem looked up suddenly from the floor and fixed the paper cap on his big head.
“The point is to have some respect,” he said. His voice was surprisingly deep.
“Amen,” said Uncle Ralph.
“Well,” I said. “I better get going.”
“You sure?” Uncle Ralph asked. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”
“No thanks. Gotta run.”
When I got outside, the car was gone. I figured Caravello had ditched me, and I couldn't really blame him. What could he possibly get out of hanging out with someone who had to be home by nine-thirty? But then the horn honked and I saw him waiting for me on the exit side of the lot, grinning with his metallic teeth. I jogged over to the car feeling like a celebrity.
I opened the passenger door. Tina was in my seat.
“Look who I found,” said Caravello.
I started to squeeze into the back seat but Caravello said, “No way. Nobody rides nigger in my car. Tina can sit on your lap.”
She sat all the way up by my knees and held onto the dashboard. She waved out the window as we started moving. I turned my head and saw Jane and Donna leaning against a car talking to three blond guys I didn't recognize.
“Those guys are dickheads,” Caravello said.
Tina lit a cigarette as we accelerated on Grand. The breeze blew wisps of her hair into my face. I wanted to touch her, but I didn't know where we stood.
“How was the shore?” I asked.
She blew smoke out the window. “Great. Like my tan?” She pulled her shirt away from her shoulder to reveal a tan line as thin and pale as a piece of spaghetti, then twisted her head to look at me. “You know that old guy in McDonald's?”
“Yeah. He's my uncle.”
“It's kinda creepy,” she said. “It's like he lives in there.”
